A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

Fujifilm has just announced the successor of their W1 consumer 3D camera and that is the new W3 which brings some cosmetic improvements in the design as well as some technical ones and all that apparently comes with a more attractive price. You’ll notice that on the W3 the interaxial distance is lowered a bit, although just by 2 millimeters to 75 mm, also the new model is able to record 3D video in 720p (1280×720) instead of the 640×480 that was available on the W1. The two sensors are still with 10 megapixel resolution, but hopefully it will perform better in low light conditions now as with the W1 that was one of the drawbacks – a lot of noise when shooting indoors or at night even with the flash. Now there is also an mini-HDMI connector built-in that is HDMI 1.4 compliant meaning that you can directly connect the camera to a big-screen 3D HDTVs and play the photos and videos in 3D.

You’ll also notice that now the W3’s controls and the camera itself is much more closer to a normal 2D camera than it was with the W1, as with the older model the controls felt a bit strange and people needed some time to adjust to using them. You’ll also notice that the autostereoscopic 3D screen (you don’t need glasses to see the 3D effect) on the back of the camera got bigger, from 2.8-inch to 3.5-inch and with better resolution, and hopefully it will also offer more viewing angles at which you’ll be able to see the depth and not just requiring you to look at it straight. We are also getting the Fujifilm NP-50 Lithium-Ion rechargeable battery instead of the NP-95 and that means decreased capacity from 1800 mAh to 1000 mAh which is kind of strange, but maybe the camera has also been optimized to be more energy efficient. The W3 model is also a bit lighter, like 10 grams less and hopefully the camera build will be as sturdy and durable as with the W1. Anyway, I’m already eager to get my hands on the new W3 camera to test and to compare it to the W1 that I already have been using for quite some time now…the Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W3 should be available in September with a price of $499.95 USD.

It seems that Fujifilm is continuing to enhance its 3D product line, as after the launch of the 3D consumer camera FinePix REAL 3D W1 and the 3D photo frame FinePix REAL 3D V1, the company has just announced another 3D-capable product. Fujifilm HD Player HDP-L1 is a 3D-capable photo and video player that can play content from SD/SDHC flash cards like the ones used in the REAL 3D W1 digital cameras (the player can also work with other non-3D Fuji digital cameras). The HDP-L1 player has an HDMI video output and can be connected directly to one of the new 3D-capable HDTVs and over HDMI and play back 3D content in 720p Side by Side format, either video in AVI format or 3D photos in MPO format (used by the W1 camera). This new product will allow you to easily view the 3D photos and videos on a larger screen than only on the small screen of the camera or on the slightly bigger V1 photo frame. So far the Fujifilm HD Player HDP-L1 has been announced only in Japan and the launch date for the product on that market is set for April 27th or in just few days and probably it will not take much time for the product to appear in Europe and America as well as the company’s 3D digital camera is already quite popular all over the world. What do you think about this product, do you think it may be useful, or the idea of having such non-universal solution is not so good?

If you’ve read my guide from 2 days ago on How to Convert MPO Pictures to JPS (Stereo JPEG) and you are one of the first owners of Fujifilm’s FinePix REAL 3D W1 digital camera this ne program might be useful for you. As you probably know Fujifilm is using the fairly new MPO (multi-picture file format) to store the stereo pairs of the pictures you shoot in 3D with their camera and there is still not many software applications that support this file format. Among one of the few is STOIK Imagic 5.0, but it a commercial product and if you need it just for extracting JPEG files from MPOs you’ll not be happy if you have to buy it. Fortunately the user cybereality at MTBS has written a small fee application called MPO2Stereo that completely replaces the need of STOIK Imagic 5.0, but you’ll still have to do some work in order to get the JPS files fro viewing with GeForce 3D Vision for instance…

The program MPO2Stereo just extracts the stereo pairs into a separate frames for left and right eye out of the MPO file you drag over the executable of the program or write as a parameter in command line. Yes it is a command line application, but even if you don’t know how to work with these you can still easily take advantage of its functionality by just dragging and dropping MPO files over it and then continuing to work with the extracted JPEGs. Of course it would’ve been great if the program joined the two files into a single side by side version and outputting a single file with JPS extensions, but still even at this moment it i quite helpful tool. So if you own a Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1 digital camera and an S3D system of some kind like Geforce 3D Vision for instance this tool might be useful to you… ;)